At 09:35 PM 12/5/00 -0600, Neil Johnson wrote:
After e-mails were used by the DOJ as "evidence" that Micro$oft was guilty of "anti-competitive" practices, it was quietly proposed by legal department at a company I know of that the e-mail system be configured to automatically delete users e-mail after a set time period, and not allow the easy off-line storage of messages. It was handily rejected by the IT department as impossible to implement and shouted down by many managers who didn't want their CYA e-mails automatically deleted.
That's one of the applications that Disappearing Ink's system is designed for. Email is stored in encrypted form, with the decryption requiring an access key from Disappearing or a similar corporate server, and the access key is regularly destroyed unless there's a specific order to retain it. This doesn't stop you from saving the mail outside the system, and it doesn't stop a court order from saying "keep all your current and future email", but it means that routine mail is routinely deleted, unless you go out of your way to move it to your CYA server or your Keep_for_later_use storage. But it substantially reduces the risk of fishing expeditions going after everything you've ever written and every backup tape you've got. Does this integrate well with Microsoft Outlook Mail gi-mongous undocumented-binary-format mailboxes? (Actually, it probably does quite well - not clear if it works well with the Exchange mail server, but MS already encourages people to use binary proprietary attachments instead of inline text. You do have to deal with the network firewall issue, but I think they've got proxy capabilities.) Thanks! Bill Bill Stewart, bill.stewart@pobox.com PGP Fingerprint D454 E202 CBC8 40BF 3C85 B884 0ABE 4639